Probably worth reading the discussions of the box on SteveHoffman.tv before jumping: Cat Stevens - Mona Bone Jakon & Tea for the Tillerman super deluxe editions coming
My $8 Metallica black album arrived early today, packed in an album mailer inside of an another box with air pillows
I'd like to add to that last comment. Remember promotional copies? Didn't they count towards sales? I don't think they really exist anymore. So maybe they sell out a bunch (or an allotment) of cheap to boost the numbers. Kind of the equivalent of Brian Epstein buying up a bunch of copies of love me do.
They also probably didn't have to pay the artists for promos. I recently read the book Sonic Boom about the Warner / Reprise golden era. They stated that all of those loss leaders for mail order (like Schlagers and Zapped) could be sold so cheaply at like $2 or so because they were officially listed as promos and they didn't have to pay the artists. That's why they were so jam packed with songs by such a variety on the Warner label.
There's a chapter in CK Lendt's book "Kiss and Sell" about Kiss suing Polygram over this practice. Spoilers - Kiss won the suit but weren't awarded damages.
I seem to recall ABC Dunhill getting sued for "deleting" albums very quickly and selling them as cutouts or overruns for which the artist got no royalties. I believe that 3 Dog Night and Steppenwolf both sued because of this. I remember the discount racks being full of records by both artists. Maybe James Gang too.
Jay Lasker (ABC)...He had a crazy stupid contract that paid him bonuses on the basis of albums shipped, not sold. The expected hilarity ensured.
I thought United Artists was king of this. I discovered Family and the Move, even early ELO, because those albums usually hit cutout bins within six months of release.
My James Gang Live In Concert record was a cutout I found in a department store in the early ‘70s. You might be right.
This is correct, an industry insider once told me that selling promos was considered theft by the agencies that calculate royalties.
I believe the innersleeves outing those albums claimed that nobody got paid except the pressing plant "because as they put it, they gotta eat."
Ditto for me. Found it in a record store in downtown Philly rather than a dept store though. Cost me $1!!! I bought another album for $1 at the same time but can't remember what it was.
For some reason I’m fascinated by the dropping price on this. It looked like it had frozen at $7.61. Stayed at that for a day or two, but now it’s falling again! Currently $6.83!!! Will it wind up less than a Frappuccino?
When growing up in the early 70’s and the only cash I had was a couple dollars from my paper route, the cut-out bin at the corner K-Mart was my favorite row to dig through. Also our local Radio station always had a 25 and later 39 cent single of the week and I rarely missed those. Rockaway Beach by the Ramones was one I got on picture sleeve and damn that record opened my world up.
I hope this isn’t a duplication of someone’s post but Tom Petty’s Wildflowers & All the Rest is sitting at $122.54 right now on Amazon for the seven LP version. It’s $50 off and other then a price dip in March has been at it’s lowest point according to camelx3. The Black Keys - El Camino is coming out in a 4 CD or 3 LP deluxe edition the first week on November. Really like the $40 price point for the CD set though the 3 LP version at $50 and the 5 LP version at $150 is just odd. Okay the $150 version does come with a air freshener.
I think the oddness the OP was referring to was the price discrepancy, per LP, on the 5LP set ($30 each) vs the 3LP set ($16.67 each). Hence the sarcastic "...the $150 version does come with an air freshener"